(back to up to ScienceWorkRobin)
Snow on sea-ice bug
Back in summer 08, Ron Kahana @ Bristol noticed that some of the deep snowpack that was reconfigured onto land ice points when he changed his atmos dumps disappeared remarkably quickly when the model run started. Inside one day, in fact. This turned out to be due to an oversight in the coastal tiling code, which only had one variable for snow depth whereas it actually needs two - one for the snowdepth on the land fraction of the gridbox, and a separate one for the snow cover on the sea-ice in the ocean fraction. Ron’s reconfigured, deep land snow was being instantly overwritten by the more modest amounts covering the sea-ice next to the coast.
FAMOUS releases up to and including XDBUA all have this issue. The fix does change the mean climate, resulting in some significant cooling off Antarctica and round the coast of Greenland.